NBA Star Trolls People Who Say His Wife Cheated Because Baby Isn't Black

By: Christopher Feery | October 2, 2018

For all of its tremendous upsides, social media can still devolve into a place that’s not very nice sometimes. There’s a whole slew of reasons for that, but those reasons do little justice to particularly egregious offenses.

The relative anonymity afforded from posting behind a keyboard or device as opposed to saying something face to face is part of it, as is the predilection of some users for anything flavored with drama.

Beyond those two points, there remains a proliferation of trolls out there regardless of which platform you prefer. Trolls exist to inflame other users, and they blow off brushback by claiming that they’re simply having some fun. As if that makes everything ok. It doesn’t.

Purposely attempting to incite others to lash out is behavior that most folks grow out of sometime around middle school age, but there remain scores of users that have missed the memo on that.

As the Daily Mail shares, our latest example comes courtesy of a Twitter account known as Turf Talk Boys. According to its profile, the brains behind the account are 'just a couple of degenerates blogging about sports and life.’ That’s perfectly fine and all, but a recent contribution into the life category was incredibly uncalled for.

The account felt the need to comment on a photo of NBA star Mike Conley, who was photographed with his wife and child. Conley’s wife is white, and his son is lighter-skinned as well. Turf Talk Boys decided to make a weak attempt at humor because of that.

“Mr Nice Guy Mike Conley at it again. He stayed with his wife after she cheated on him and had another man's baby,” read the post.

To Conley’s credit, he took the high road. He replied with a pic of talk show host Maury Povich and a solid reply.

“The results are in. Mike, you are the father,” Conley posted.

Kudos to Conley for staying classy here, but it’s sad that we even have to point this out to begin with. There’s nothing funny about joking about another’s family, let alone the paternity of a man’s child.

Conley is a public figure. As such, he’s unfortunately open to criticism and ‘hot takes’ from time to time. That same liberty does not extend to his wife and child.

While it’s easy to write off what Turf Talk Boys had to say as a ‘joke,’ that’s what leads to social media resembling a cesspool at times. Jokes are everywhere and there’s no getting around that, but there used to be some kind of unwritten rule about leaving families out of it when discussing a famous face.

Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking for an era that’s dead and buried, but a failure to abide by that rule has helped lead to a declining of standards in what’s ok to share and what’s not.

Likes are great and all, but do they really need to be gained at the expense of attempting to humiliate another person? Those that truly have share-worthy things to say don’t have to resort to such tactics.